Saturday, February 18, 2012

ROMNEY THE LIAR CONTINUES TO LIE ABOUT OBAMA, DEFENSE, AND THE NAVY

Willard, who is utterly incapable of making a statement on public policy without uttering a lie (or more often, multiple lies) is really pushing his "Obama is weak on defense" mythology. In a piece written for The Wall Street Journal (where else?), Willard lays the falsehoods on thick and fast. Spencer Ackerman has the story here:

...this is where Romney really goes off the rails:

[Obama] plans to cut back on naval shipbuilding, shrink our Air Force, and slash our ground forces. Because of his policies and failed leadership, our military is facing nearly $1 trillion in cuts over the next decade.

The ground forces will indeed get slashed. The Air Force “shrink” equals the loss of about 200 mostly old aircraft out of a fleet of about 4000 planes. Shipbuilding I’ll return to in a second. It’s the “nearly $1 trillion in cuts over the next decade” claim that deserves scrutiny.

How does Romney get to such a whopping figure? First, by adding the scheduled cuts to future defense spending over ten years, $487 billion/decade in the Pentagon’s estimate, to the prospective $600 billion +/decade in cuts imposed by sequestration under the Budget Control Act starting next year.
You’ll notice: these cuts haven’t taken effect yet. Which leads to point number two: these are “cuts” in the sense that they’re reductions from previously anticipated defense spending...

On shipbuilding: this just ain’t true. Don’t take my word for it, take Adm. Jonathan Greenert’s. Greenert is the Chief of Naval Operations. He says that the fleet will be the same size in 2017 as it is today under his Navy’s planning, even though shipbuilding does get cut in this current budget, and there are a spate of retirements coming up. How’s he square the difference? This is what Greenert told a small group of reporters aboard the U.S.S. Wasp a week ago Saturday:

"Simply put, if you have ships I retire today — if I take ships out of the shipbuilding plan, they’re not gone yet, they haven’t been built. We have a lot of ships under construction during [inaudible], this period of time, such that that the fleet looks a lot like — numbers — about the same today as it does in 2017. OK, you say, you’ve got the numbers, but what about the details? Eleven carriers, as you all know, that’s already been announced. The Destroyers size is about the same. A lot of our reductions are such that, in the near term, it’s a trade off. A balance. Cruisers, destroyers — you’ll see in the budget, when we release the numbers, you’ve got to look at the class of ships, the classes that are being retired…"

No, Willard, President Obama is not "weakening" the nation--and you know it. You're simply lying to advance your own cause. It's too bad for you that the Chief of Naval Operations himself has contradicted you on your navy scare-mongering.

But then again, lying and scare-mongering are the things you're best at. I guess that's why you engage in them non-stop.